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    Ajax and the Fragile Business of Champions League Soccer

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    The stumbles of a famed Dutch club are a lesson in fallibility of even the best methods, and a reminder of how fast it can all go wrong at the top of the sport.All of the little things had been considered. The design was so painstaking that even the fine details seemed to possess explanatory power. The list of virtues on the wall, the way the light poured into the canteen, the communal spaces laid out according to Montessori principles. Everywhere inside the home of the Dutch soccer club Ajax, the human touches stood out.And yet, in essence, the youth academy known as De Toekomst was, and is, a factory, an industrialized production line geared for maximum efficiency. Its facilities might have been upgraded over the years, but in one guise or another it has been feeding players into Ajax’s team for decades. From there, its graduates have gone on to play for the Netherlands, to represent clubs across Europe. The clue, really, is in the name. De Toekomst means The Future.It is hard to define, accurately, quite what the academy means to Ajax. It is more than just its educational arm and its supply chain. It is not its secret weapon, because — along with its conceptual nephew in Barcelona — it may well be the most celebrated, most fabled youth system in soccer. To label it the club’s heart and soul is more poetic, but less exact, less meaningful. De Toekomst is where players receive the Ajax imprimatur. It is the club’s core, but it is also its edge.Ajax is not the only club to have a celebrated academy, of course. It is not even unique in inculcating its prospects in the tenets of a tightly defined, nonnegotiable philosophy.Ajax is different, now, not so much in how it runs its hothouse of talent but in what happens afterward, where De Toekomst sits in the club’s organizational structure, the role it plays in the business model. For most elite teams, youth systems exist somewhere on the spectrum between optional extra and unexpected bonus.At Ajax, the pipeline of young talent never stops pumping out new stars.Olaf Kraak/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe idea, of course, is that at some point they produce a player or two for the senior side. Quite when that point might come, though, is deemed to be in the lap of the gods. It is a relatively new phenomenon that teams might take into consideration the talent emerging from its academy when planning its transfer strategy.The prospects who do make it through, on the whole, tend to offer a talent that is both ready-made and irresistible. Two or three or more fallow years may pass, and millions of dollars can be invested, waiting for a Phil Foden or a Trent Alexander-Arnold or a Gavi.At Ajax, the paradigm has always been the opposite. The whole club is geared toward the obvious but revolutionary idea that there are always more soccer players. De Toekomst is expected to produce excellent ones: Some years will be more fruitful than others, of course, but whether a trickle or a flood, the flow should always be constant.In return, the club ensures that there is space for them to fill. Ajax does not just graciously stand aside to allow older players to leave for brighter lights or greener pastures or a disappointing spell at Manchester United. It all but pushes them out of the door. Donny Van de Beek must leave so that Ryan Gravenberch can flourish. Gravenberch must go in order to allow Kenneth Taylor his opportunity.In the last five years or so, Ajax seemed to have perfected the formula. No team outside Europe’s self-appointed, self-selecting aristocrats — Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, plus those backed either by a nation state or by the television bonanza on offer in the Premier League — had accommodated itself quite so well to the game’s new economic reality.Ajax produced and replaced, produced and replaced, as if De Toekomst itself was mining a bottomless seam. Every summer, ever greater profits swelled Ajax’s coffers, allowing it to invest further in those areas of its squad that the academy could not replenish.It ran the most expensive salary roll in the Netherlands. It added a string of championships. It started to compete, for the first time in two decades, with Europe’s superpowers. The club began to conceive of itself as a Dutch version of Bayern Munich, its primacy bleeding remorselessly into lasting dominance.And then, all of a sudden, it went wrong. Ajax finished third in the Eredivisie last year, missing out on a place in the Champions League. Its start to this season was even worse: After five games, it had amassed only five points, its worst opening to a campaign in 60 years.Ajax is off to a forgettable start this season.Olaf Kraak/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesLast weekend, Ajax found its nadir: With less than an hour played, the club found itself losing by 3-0 to Feyenoord, its archrival, on home turf. The team’s most demonstrative ultra group, the F Side, began to hurl flares onto the field in protest. The game was abandoned, the stadium cleared.Afterward, some fans tried to force their way back inside. Others were charged by mounted police officers. The final 40 minutes or so of the game were eventually completed on Wednesday. The Johan Cruyff Arena was empty. Ajax conceded a fourth goal almost immediately.Quite where the blame lies for the rapid unspooling of all that Ajax had built is open to conjecture. It may be related to the departures of two of the architects of the modern iteration of the club: Marc Overmars, the former sporting director, who left in disgrace, and Edwin van der Sar, the longstanding chief executive, who did not.Or perhaps the descent started in summer 2022, when the club sanctioned just a little too much change, watching as its coach, Erik Ten Hag, left for Manchester United. He took two of the team’s best players with him, at the end of a transfer window in which a half-dozen others had gone, too.Or maybe even that is one beat too far: It might simply be the case that Ajax erred by replacing Ten Hag with Alfred Schreuder, who did not see out even a season in Amsterdam. A more judicious succession plan may have allowed the club to ride out the transition and at least make it to this season’s Champions League, rather than being forced to sell another tranche of players simply to balance the accounts.The fans, though, made it plain that they had a different villain in mind. Sven Mislintat, the German sporting director brought in to retool the club’s squad — and to modernize its approach to recruitment — became a lightning rod for criticism with remarkable speed. The club, needing a sacrificial lamb after the chaos against Feyenoord, decided he was as good a candidate as any, and fired him.It seems unlikely the problem will be solved in one fell move, of course, but Mislintat always seemed a strange appointment, given just what it is that makes Ajax tick. His approach was focused on signing unheralded young players from overlooked markets — the German second division, Eastern Europe — and giving them a chance to shine.Ajax fired its German sporting director, Sven Mislintat, this week.Phil Nijhuis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn most contexts, that would be admirable. Ajax had enjoyed no little success in attracting players from Brazil (albeit not a market anyone could describe as overlooked) and Mexico in recent years. Mislintat’s mistake was forgetting that the first place Ajax should look for players is closer to home. The club’s future, after all, is always supposed to be on hand. His recruits were seen as barring the way for the next generation of graduates from De Toekomst. At that point, Ajax no longer really felt like Ajax.There are two warnings in all of this, both of them bleak, both of them with resonance far beyond Ajax. The first is that there is no such thing as a formula; no matter how certain a club’s place seems to be, no matter how assured its methods or lionized its approach, nothing is eternal.The second is that soccer is a fragile, perilous business. Building what made the club special, what made it successful, took years. Generations, really. It required not just a grand, overarching vision, but careful stewardship, delicate handling, nurture both loving and cautious. There were times when the journey was anything but smooth. There were undeniable miscalculations along the way. But Ajax had made it through, and built itself a place in a game that many felt had moved out of its reach.And then, in the space of a year — give or take — it has watched it all crumble to the ground. A couple of misjudged appointments, a handful of bad decisions, and all of a sudden it was gone. Ajax lost sight, perhaps, of what it was trying to do, of what made the whole thing work, and that was enough.Now it has to do it all again. It should not take quite so long for the club to chart its course this time, but how long that process will take is anyone’s guess. Inside Ajax, though, they will surely know that everything will begin wherever everything always begins. The priority will be to make sure the production line keeps firing. That is where Ajax will find its tomorrow. The clue really is in the name.CorrespondenceIt is important, I think, for news organizations to listen to their audience, particularly at a time when misinformation — the slightly unnecessary euphemism for “lying” — has such a dissembling effect on public discourse. And the message we have received from our audience, this week, has been loud and clear: You feel this newsletter should be about ice cream.“I am a loyal reader of the newsletter,” an email from John begins, fairly ominously. It sounds as if there is a “but” coming. Oh yes: “But your comments on ice cream have provided me with an impulse to write some correspondence. Having not yet seen your full list, I am struck by your choice of La Carraia in Florence as a top spot: for me, the best gelateria in that neighborhood is Sbrino.”(Kindly, John has also directed me to Cesare, in Reggio Calabria, a place that he in no way controversially has christened “the best” gelateria in Italy.)Ray Judoaitis, on the other hand, is a purist: Ice cream does not need to be ranked, he believes, because ice cream is good in its very essence. “Ranking ice cream shops may be futile, as I have rarely had a bad one. Therefore access and amount become significant. To that end, I recommend Café Maioli in Florence.”And over on whatever Twitter is called now, Georg Baumann wanted to alert me to the existence of Duo — Sicilian Ice Cream in Berlin; he believes it might prove to be worthy of inclusion. This, of course, is the point of the Ice Cream List: It is not, and can never be, definitive. You have to keep eating ice cream in order to make it as comprehensive, and as current, as possible. It is probably best thought of as a quest, except with more salted caramel than normal. More

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      The Giant World Cup Rookie and an Enduring Dutch Mystery

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      The Netherlands is Europe’s most reliable talent factory. Unless you need a goalkeeper.DOHA, Qatar — As they sat around the dinner table, Andries Noppert’s family raised the question as gently and as kindly as they could.He had been trying to make it as a professional soccer player for more than a decade. At 6 feet 8 inches, he had the physical gifts, and nobody would question his determination, his drive. But he was 26 now, and if everyone was completely honest, it did not seem to be working out. He had been at four clubs, and hardly played for any of them. He had made barely more than a dozen appearances in seven years.The constant disappointment, the ongoing frustration, was taking its toll, and that was before anyone even mentioned his misfortune with injury. Perhaps, Noppert’s parents suggested, it might be time to try something else. His wife wondered if a career in the police force might provide a more reliable salary for their young family.Two years on from that attempted intervention, Noppert finds himself at the World Cup, and not as a mere observer. He has barely played 50 senior games as a professional, but on Saturday he is almost certain to start in goal for the Netherlands in its round of 16 match against the United States. It is, as Noppert himself has put it, more than a little “bizarre.”His own interpretation of his unusual career arc — the long, slow burn, followed by the sudden and unexpected ignition — is that his progress was slowed not only by a succession of injuries but by his own failure to grasp his talent. “I may have made the wrong choices at times,” he has said.It is an assessment reinforced by those who have worked with him. Noppert started out at Heerenveen, his local team, before spells at NAC Breda, the Italian side Foggia, Dordrecht back in the Netherlands and, after he rejected his family’s attempts to persuade him to go into law enforcement, Go Ahead Eagles.It was only at the latter that he found regular playing time. Until then, he had been “at peace with being second choice,” according to Kees van Wonderen, who coached him at Go Ahead Eagles and then, last summer, returned him to Heerenveen. Noppert “lacked sharpness and hunger,” he said.Nopport with his children after a training session last week. His family once tried to persuade him to give up on soccer as a career.Alberto Pizzoli/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“Let’s just say that Andries didn’t make it hard to not pick him,” he said.Noppert’s individual case, then, might be filed in the same category as all of the other heartening stories the World Cup unearths at quadrennial intervals: the heroes who emerge from nowhere, the players seeking redemption, the sudden superstars.His story, though, does not exist in isolation. It is part of a pattern, and one that, from a Dutch point of view, is less touching and more troubling. A couple of years after he might have given up on his career, Noppert is at the World Cup not only because of his determination, his refusal to give in, but because the Netherlands cannot produce goalkeepers.There is, of course, one noteworthy exception: Edwin van der Sar, formerly of Ajax, Juventus and Manchester United. And there have been, over the years, a trickle of perfectly respectable, though hardly awe-inspiring, goalkeepers who have won the Dutch colors: Hans van Breukelen, Ed de Goey, Jasper Cillessen.The supply, though, has not been steady enough to dispel the impression that the Netherlands, a country that churns out some of the brightest young outfield talent on the planet at industrial volume, has a chronic blind spot between the posts.Noppert, after all, has been selected ahead of Justin Bijlow, who has spent only 18 months as Feyenoord’s first-choice goalkeeper, and Remko Pasveer, a 39-year-old who made his international debut this year. The reasons for that, as offered by Louis van Gaal, the Dutch coach, hardly amount to resounding praise.“He was in shape,” van Gaal said of Noppert. “We were impressed by how he played in the weeks prior to the World Cup. He only stopped the balls he could stop.”But then that, perhaps, is all that is necessary. After all, the pickings are distinctly slim. No major European team outside of Ajax employs a Dutch goalkeeper. Seven of the 18 teams in the Dutch top flight employ imported goalkeepers. Van Gaal has taken roughly a third of the qualified goalkeepers available to him to Qatar.The reasons for that veer from the loftily philosophical to the pragmatically economic, the former PSV Eindhoven and Feyenoord goalkeeper Patrick Lodewijks told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant earlier this year. Lodewijks spent five years working with the country’s soccer federation as a goalkeeper coach.Noppert and the Netherlands can advance to the quarterfinals by beating the United States on Saturday.Laurence Griffiths/Getty ImagesDutch teams invariably demand that their goalkeepers, as is the country’s tradition, possess the technical ability to take part in build-up play, he said, but it comes at the cost of neglecting the rather more rudimentary skills of saving shots and catching crosses.“The best goalkeeper in the Eredivisie is a German, Lars Unnerstall,” Lodewijks said last season. “A giant, top athlete, great reflexes. But he was second choice at PSV, because he couldn’t play soccer well.”The financial reality of Dutch soccer, meanwhile, discourages clubs from investing too much time in their goalkeepers. All Dutch teams are reliant on generating income from transfer fees — even Ajax, the richest and most powerful side in the Eredivisie, earned as much money in selling two players to Manchester United in a few weeks last summer as it does from all other revenue streams over the course of a year — and goalkeepers fetch significantly smaller fees than, for example, elfin attacking midfielders. The goalkeeper business is not a lucrative one.Lodewijks suggests the solution is a complete overhaul in how Dutch clubs think about the position: spending more time on dedicated training sessions, rather than focusing on how goalkeepers can be involved in general play; major teams sending the most promising prospects out on loan to smaller teams, where they may have rather more to do than watching on passively “as youth teams win big.”Until then, the position of Dutch goalkeeper will remain unusually fertile ground for feel-good stories like Noppert’s: a place for late bloomers and stray talents and prospective law enforcement officers.He does, at least, seem well-suited to such a rapid promotion. “He’s a real Frisian,” defender Virgil van Dijk said last week, referring to the part of the Netherlands where Noppert grew up, a place famed for its stoicism and straight-talking. (It is unclear how this differs from the rest of the country.) “He’s sober, but very direct. He’s a boy after my own heart.”Van Gaal, too, has taken heart from how unmoved Noppert was by the prospect of making his debut for his country at the World Cup. “He has the sort of personality that means he would not be too impressed by this championship,” he said. It would be a lot tougher, after all, being a policeman. More

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      At Ajax, the Future Is Always Now

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      Ajax sold the bulk of its Champions League-ready squad over the summer and never looked back. It can’t afford to.THE HAGUE, the Netherlands — As a rule, Arco Gnocchi regards himself as too old to buy a replica jersey with his favorite Ajax player’s name emblazoned across the back. Such displays of hero worship, he feels, are not entirely becoming of a person ticking through their early 40s. “Generally,” he said, “it’s for kids.”This summer, though, for the first time in roughly a decade, Gnocchi made an exception. The jersey he bought for the new season bears the No. 9 and, above it, the surname of Brian Brobbey, Ajax’s bullish, bustling 20-year-old forward. Brobbey struck him as the perfect choice. “He exemplifies everything Ajax embodies at the moment,” he said.That includes the fact that, in a couple of years at most, Gnocchi expects Brobbey to render his jersey obsolete. Brobbey has already left Ajax once — as a teenager, for an unhappy spell at the German club RB Leipzig — and, if things go to plan, he will leave again soon enough. “He is massively talented,” Gnocchi said. “He’ll be gone by the time he’s 23.”That is how business has worked at Ajax for as long as anyone can remember. It has long been a place players come from, perhaps the most prolific, reliable, high-caliber talent factory in world soccer. Ajax has seen Johan Cruyff and Marco van Basten and Dennis Bergkamp and Wesley Sneijder and Frenkie de Jong and countless others come. And, for half a century, it has watched them all go, too.In that sense, this summer was no different. The transfer window began with Edwin van der Sar, the club’s former goalkeeper who is now its chief executive, fondly bidding farewell to the goalkeeper André Onana — who departed for Inter Milan — and the right back Noussair Mazraoui, who was destined for Bayern Munich. He did not even seem especially fazed by the prospective loss of Ryan Gravenberch, a gifted 20-year-old midfielder, who soon followed Mazraoui to Munich. “He has a wish to leave,” van der Sar said.His serenity was no surprise. Ajax does not operate under any illusions. It expects players to leave. It budgets for it, plans for it and to some extent relies on it. “It’s a steppingstone team,” said Gnocchi, host of the “Pak Schaal” podcast, the most popular Ajax podcast in the Netherlands. “That can be difficult to accept, but if we’re a steppingstone team, at least we’re the best steppingstone team.”By the end of August, though, the mood among the club’s hierarchy had shifted. The departures had not stopped with Mazraoui, Onana and Gravenberch. Sébastien Haller, the focal point of Ajax’s forward line, had gone to Borussia Dortmund. The defender Perr Schuurs had joined Torino in Italy. Nicolàs Tagliafico, the long-serving left back, had left for Lyon.Ronald Wittek/EPA, via ShutterstockMatteo Bazzi/EPA, via ShutterstockRyan Gravenberch, top left, and Noussair Mazraoui went to Bayern Munich, and goalkeeper André Onana now backstops Inter Milan. Antony’s move to Manchester United, though, extracted a higher price.Shaun Botterill/Getty ImagesThe two that hurt, though, were Antony — a vibrant, virtuoso Brazilian wing — and Lisandro Martínez, a gritty, combative Argentine defender, an undoubted fan favorite. “He’s the sort of player who plays with his teeth bared,” said Marcel Stephan, a writer who has been watching Ajax since the late 1970s. Both Antony and Martínez ended up at Manchester United, where they were reunited with the other significant figure Ajax had lost this summer: Coach Erik ten Hag.They were not, it is safe to say, sent on their way with the club’s best wishes. Antony had to refused to train to force his move — and even then, Ajax held out sufficiently to force United to pay $101 million for his signature — while Martínez reportedly confronted the sporting director Gerry Hamstra over the club’s perceived unwillingness to let him leave.Even as Antony’s departure loomed, ten Hag’s replacement as coach, Alfred Schreuder, had already made clear that he felt there had been too much change. “We’ve already let a lot of players go,” he said as he faced up to the prospect of losing the Brazilian. “We want to keep a strong squad. New players have arrived, and we have told them what our plans are.”The solace, for the club, is obvious. Ajax’s annual budget stands in the region of $170 million. The sales of Martínez and Antony alone generated around $150 million. That money allowed Ajax not only to break the Dutch transfer record to sign Steven Bergwijn from Tottenham, but to afford a wage bill that far outstrips any of its domestic rivals. That financial advantage has helped Ajax win every Eredivisie title that was awarded since 2019.Every Ajax squad is a calculated mix of past, present and future. The current version opened its Champions League campaign with a 4-0 win over Rangers last week. On Tuesday, it will visit Liverpool.Piroschka Van De Wouw/ReutersThe impact on Ajax’s fans is more complex, an almost perfect distillation of all the benefits, blessings, imbalances and iniquities of modern soccer; it is, indeed, hard to think of a club that has been more exposed to the consequences of the sport’s willing obeisance to a ruthless free market.There is, of course, a sadness, an awareness that — as Gnocchi put it — Ajax’s “success is also its downfall,” a knowledge that the better it is at producing players, the more certain it is that those players will leave.There is a sense of if only, too: if only Gravenberch could have played alongside de Jong, rather than instead of him; if only Antony had stayed one more year; if only the club was not engaged in what is, inherently, a Sisyphean task. “It is always painful when a player leaves,” said Marjan Olfers, a professor of sport and law at the Free University of Amsterdam and a former member of Ajax’s supervisory board. “You cannot build a team for five years. You always have to start again.”Occasionally, perhaps increasingly, there are grumbles. “Anyone who remembers the 2000s and the 2010s is thankful for what we have now,” said Gnocchi, referring to a period when Ajax spent fortunes on mediocrities. “We’re very appreciative of good business, because we know it is possible to buy rubbish in return. But there are fans who feel the club is starting to feel more like a trading company than a soccer team.”And, certainly, there is plenty of resignation. “We’re used to it,” Stephan said. At 58, he said, after a half-century of following the team, the constant change is nothing new.Menno Pot, author of “The New Ajax,” a book that examined the club’s transformation in recent years, noted that — until relatively recently — any player leaving the club would be granted an emotional farewell. “We’d let off fireworks, fan groups would present players with presents,” he said. “We figured out a while ago there was no need. The players were going to leave. These are short-term relationships.”That, more than anything else, is what has been lost: the connection to Ajax’s role as a club that “educates young players, rather than acquires them,” as Olfers put it. Ajax fans, in general, “find it harder to identify with individual players,” she said. “It is more about the club.”Brian Brobbey: 20 years old, Amsterdam-reared and coming soon to a transfer rumor mill near you.Olaf Kraak/Agence France-Presse, via Anp/Afp Via Getty ImagesGnocchi might have gone for Brobbey on the back of his jersey, but he believes the most popular shirt in the stands at Ajax’s stadium is not that of a budding homegrown superstar but Dusan Tadic, the club’s veteran playmaker. Tadic is 33 now. He is contracted to the club until he is 36. He is that rarest of things: a safe bet.But there is also a pride in knowing that Ajax is producing, in vast quantities, a raw material that the world’s richest clubs crave. “There is a beauty to it,” Pot said. There is hope, too, in great abundance, a confidence that tomorrow will be no worse than today, and might even be better.Most crucially, there is a sense of identity. The names on the jerseys may be fleeting, but the club itself stands for something that it once feared it had lost forever. That, more than anything, gives fans something to cling on to when everything else is in permanent flux.“I think, after the Bosman ruling in 1995, Ajax went through an identity crisis,” Pot said. “We did not know how to be Ajax any more. You heard it said that we could never compete in Europe again, that winning the Champions League just was not possible. And people were mostly OK with that.“But over the last few years, they have found the answer to that question. They have figured out how to be Ajax in the modern world. We have to rebuild completely every three years, and every once in a while we get a truly great team, one that could just go all the way. And when we do, it is something that is completely our own.”Peter Dejong/Associated Press More

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      Erik Ten Hag Appointed by Manchester United

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      The Dutchman is the latest coach tasked with resurrecting Manchester United, English soccer’s fallen giant that is enduring a near decade-long slump.Manchester United has turned to the Dutchman Erik ten Hag as the latest coach to help revive its fortunes after a near decade-long slump toward mediocrity. The decline has led to United’s falling away from contention for the Premier League championship, a title that once had seemed a divine right to fans of one of the world’s most celebrated sporting franchises.United’s sudden and now protracted run of poor form followed two decades of dominance under the legendary manager Alex Ferguson. Ferguson retired after United’s 20th and last championship in 2013, and a succession of high-profile coaches have been unable to replicate that success as United has fallen further and further behind its bitter rivals Manchester City and Liverpool.United, owned by the Glazer family, based in the United States, hope ten Hag will be able to replicate the success he has achieved with the Netherlands’ biggest club, Ajax, which he will continue to lead until moving to England at the end of the season. Under ten Hag, Ajax has regularly punched above its weight against wealthier European rivals, playing a swashbuckling attacking style, with homegrown talent, something that was once a signature of Manchester United teams built by Ferguson.United said that it had signed ten Hag to a contract through June 2025 and that it had the option to extend the agreement for a further year. United will pay Ajax about $2 million to release ten Hag.Under ten Hag, Ajax’s talented young squad has won a glut of domestic honors. But his highest profile success came in 2019 when he almost, and improbably, led the team to the final of the Champions League, falling just short after conceding a goal in the final seconds of the semifinal.“It will be difficult to leave Ajax after these incredible years, and I can assure our fans of my complete commitment and focus on bringing this season to a successful conclusion before I move to Manchester United,” ten Hag said.The task at United could not be more difficult. As United spent more money than at any other point in its history, its performances have only grown worse, leading to a succession of managerial exits and fan unrest against the Glazers.Ten Hag will be expected to oversee an overhaul of the club’s poorly balanced and costly roster, but also the culture of the club, where tales of locker room disharmony have frequently found their way into the public domain. News media reports said he would have as much $260 million to spend on new players during the off season.“It is a great honor to be appointed manager of Manchester United, and I am hugely excited by the challenge ahead,” ten Hag said. “I know the history of this great club and the passion of the fans, and I am absolutely determined to develop a team capable of delivering the success they deserve.”He will follow the German coach Ralf Rangnick, who was hired on a temporary basis to replace Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, a popular former player with United who was appointed with little high-profile coaching experience and struggled to come to terms with the scale of the task of managing United, a team with a global fan base and expectations of success. He was not the only one to fail to meet those lofty expectations.United has stumbled from coach to coach with varying formulas — high-profile figures like Louis van Gaal and Jose Mourinho as well as the Scotsman David Moyes, Ferguson’s handpicked successor — without ever looking likely to come close to putting down foundations that could put the team back on course for regular success.Ten Hag’s appointment comes two days after United was humbled, 4-0, at Liverpool, which is currently engaged in a high octane, neck-and-neck race with City for the Premier League title. United has drifted to sixth place, 23 points behind the leader, City, and is at risk of failing to qualify for next season’s Champions League.The appointment is not unexpected. United had long targeted ten Hag as a possible new coach and had spoken with him on numerous occasions as it looked to plan for the future. United had alighted on ten Hag, 52, along with the Argentine Mauricio Pochettino, the Paris St. Germain coach, who drew admirers for his team-building work at Tottenham Hotspur. In the end it is ten Hag who has been entrusted with the opportunity to revive the fallen giant.“In our conversations with Erik leading up to this appointment, we were deeply impressed with his long-term vision for returning Manchester United to the level we want to be competing at, and his drive and determination to achieve that,” John Murtough, United’s football director, said.United’s slide has been so profound that it may be years before ten Hag can be expected to make United challengers for the biggest titles. The current coach, Rangnick, said as much after the miserable performance against Liverpool, during which many United fans left the stadium well before the referee brought an end to the humiliation.“It is embarrassing, it is disappointing, maybe even humiliating,” a chastened but cleareyed Rangnick said on Tuesday. “We have to accept they are six years ahead of us now. When Jurgen Klopp came they changed at the club and lifted not just the team but the club and city to a new level. That is what needs to happen with us in the next transfer windows.” More

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      Marc Overmars, Dutch Soccer Star, Quits Post After Admitting to Inappropriate Texts

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      Marc Overmars, a former player who became a director at Ajax, one of Europe’s top clubs, apologized for his actions. The club said he had “gone over the line.”Marc Overmars, a former Dutch soccer star who became a top executive at one of Europe’s most prominent teams, has abruptly left his job after admitting to sending inappropriate text messages to female colleagues.Overmars, 48, had been director of football affairs at AFC Ajax, the Amsterdam soccer team, since 2012. He had recently renewed his contract until June 2026, according to Ajax, which announced the resignation late Sunday. Many details remained unclear, including whether charges had been filed against Overmars.Overmars apologized for his behavior in a statement issued by Ajax, in which he said he was “ashamed.”“Last week I was confronted with reports about my behavior. And how this has come across to others,” Overmars said. “Unfortunately, I didn’t realize that I was crossing the line with this, but that was made clear to me in recent days.”“For someone in my position, this behavior is unacceptable. I now see that too. But it is too late. I see no other option but to leave Ajax,” he added.Overmars played as a winger for some of Europe’s top soccer teams, including Ajax, Arsenal and Barcelona, as well as the Dutch national team.Ajax is currently leading the Eredivisie, the highest level of professional soccer in the Netherlands, and is the defending national champion. The resignation comes as a sexual misconduct scandal dominates the news and has captured national attention in the Netherlands after allegations emerged of widespread sexual misconduct at a popular TV talent show. Experts have said that issues surrounding consent and sexual misconduct have long been ignored in the Netherlands.Leen Meijaard, the chairman of Ajax’s supervisory board, called Overmars “probably the best football director that Ajax has had.” But, he added, after consulting an expert and the team’s chief executive they concluded that it was not an option for him to continue in his role.“It is devastating for the women who have had to deal with this behavior. When we heard the news, we immediately acted,” Meijaard said. “Unfortunately, he has really gone over the line.”The soccer world has seen multiple harassment scandals recently. The head of a program run by FIFA, the world soccer governing body, to bring together luminaries of the game, FIFA Legends, was found to have sexually harassed a subordinate in 2019. In 2020, female soccer players, including some who played in Haiti’s national soccer program, accused senior soccer officials of coercing players into having sex.Edwin van der Sar, a former star goalkeeper who is currently Ajax’s chief executive and who played with Overmars at Ajax in the 1990s, called the situation “appalling” and said that the club would pay more attention to matters of misconduct in the near future.“A safe sport and working climate is very important,” van der Sar said. “We are working on something very wonderful here at Ajax, so this news will also be a blow to everyone who cares about Ajax.” More

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      Cameroon's Goalkeeper André Onana Just Wants to Play

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      Cameroon’s 25-year-old goalkeeper has already had his career interrupted twice by bans. Now he’s back, and eager to move on.For a goalkeeper of Andre Onana’s experience, the passage of play midway through the first half of Cameroon’s Africa Cup of Nations opener should have been routine.Instead, it was anything but. Not once but twice, Onana misjudged the flight of the ball as it was crossed from one side of the field to the other. The second flap at thin air allowed Burkina Faso to take the lead, and left Onana with his head in the turf, acutely aware of his role in the chaos.Cameroon would eventually rally, score twice and win to provide relief to the millions of fans who expect them to challenge for the tournament’s championship. Onana, too, would rally, eventually playing to the reputation of a man widely regarded as one of Africa’s best goalkeepers. But his rustiness could be explained by something everyone in Yaoundé’s Paul Biya Stadium knew:For the better part of a year, Onana has hardly played soccer at all.In October 2020, Onana failed a routine drug test after it revealed traces of a banned masking agent. He claimed, and investigators agreed, that it had all been an error: He was found to have mistakenly ingested the drug after confusing his wife’s medication for his own after complaining of a headache.Rules are rules, though, and Onana was banished. For seven months, he was not allowed to even set foot inside a soccer stadium, let alone train with his teammates at his club team, the Dutch champion Ajax. And even when his ban was reduced last fall, and his drug exile ended, a new professional one began. Ajax, it seemed, had moved on while its goalkeeper was gone.A blunder by Onana allowed Burkina Faso to take an early lead against Cameroon in the teams’ Africa Cup of Nations opener on Sunday.Mohamed Abd El Ghany/ReutersSo for Onana, 25, this month’s Africa Cup of Nations championship is a rare opportunity to remind people of the player he was, and who he is: the skilled goalkeeper who helped Ajax win two Dutch league titles; the last line of defense for a team that came seconds from reaching the Champions League final in 2019; the anchor of a national squad hoping to regain a continental title on home soil.That Onana can showcase his skills in his home country in the city he grew up in is making it all the more special.“I was talking with my brother, and I said that I think I will know the whole stadium because we live close by,” Onana, 25, said in an interview on the eve of the tournament.Many of Onana’s earliest memories, in fact, involve soccer. Playing in the streets for hours with friends. Walking to the national stadium to sit in the sun watching the national team. His first heroes were African, he said, stars like Patrick Mbomba or Joseph-Désiré Job who could bring the crowd to its feet just by returning for matches at the national stadium that sat a mere 20 minutes from Onana’s front door.The national team was everything to Onana in those days. Cameroon had been one of the first African teams to become a fixture at the World Cup, and even as generations of players turned over, its matchdays offered a source of joy, and pride. Attending games, Onana said, was often an all-day affair.“We were there five hours before the game just to watch 90 minutes,” he said. “And those 90 minutes could affect your week, your month. It was amazing that time to be honest.”Onana’s journey to the national team can be traced to a pickup game before he turned 10. After spending most of the game tearing around the field in midfield or in attack, his preferred positions, Onana was told it was his turn in goal. He excelled, repelling shots that wowed his friends and also an older brother, who told him, “André, I think this is your best position.”Within months he was named as the best goalkeeper at a tournament run by an academy set up by the Cameroon striker Samuel Eto’o. His performance earned him a trial, and eventually a move, to Eto’o’s academy in Douala, about four hours from home. There, his performances caught the eye of scouts from F.C. Barcelona.Onana moved to Barcelona’s famed academy shortly after he turned 13. He quickly embraced his new surroundings, but three years into his new adventure, it all came to an abrupt stop. FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, announced that Barcelona had breached its regulations on registering minors by signing Onana and other players from outside Europe. Onana, 16 at the time, was told he could not represent Barcelona until he was 18.While the club jettisoned most of the foreign-born players subject to the rule, Onana’s promise was so high that he was persuaded to remain in the academy, where he was allowed to continue practicing every day but not to play in official games. The hiatus from competition took its toll. “You can train as much as you like but in the end you train to play,” Onana said. “And if you don’t, it affects you mentally and physically.”By the time Onana turned 18, and was again eligible to play, Barcelona had signed Marc-André ter Stegen, a promising German goalkeeper, and Claudio Bravo, who had just helped Chile win the Copa América. Onana knew, he said, his future lay elsewhere.He decided to try his luck in the Netherlands, and within a year he had established himself as Ajax’s No. 1 goalkeeper. He was only 19.The timing could not have been better. Ajax, like Barcelona, had a passion for homegrown talent, and the talents that had just started to come into its first team turned out to be its best in a generation. And the ball skills Onana had honed at Barcelona were a perfect fit for his Ajax’s style.Success quickly followed, as did strong performances against richer clubs in European competitions like the Champions League. By the summer of 2020, some of those teams had started to circle, offering Ajax millions for its young goalkeeper. Ajax declined to sell, confident the price for Onana, and its other young stars, would continue to rise.And then, just as it had a few years earlier, it all stopped for Onana when his drug test came back positive. Onana appealed the one-year ban he was given, and European soccer’s governing body accepted his explanation.But under soccer’s regulations, he was still responsible, and so the punishment, reduced to seven months, meant that starting in February 2021 Onana was effectively ostracized from soccer. When his Ajax teammates lifted the trophy that spring to celebrate a title to which he had contributed, he wasn’t allowed to enter the stadium to watch.He had, by then, made peace with his banishment. It was not, after all, his first. But Ajax officials, including the chief executive Edwin van der Sar, a former star goalkeeper, still worried about how Onana would manage the sporting and psychological toll of his time away.Onana has appeared in only two games for Ajax since returning from his most recent ban. He said he planned to leave the club after the season.Maurice Van Steen/EPA, via Shutterstock“When I left the club, I said to Edwin, ‘This is nothing, I’m already used to it,’” Onana said. “He was like, ‘André, how?’ I told him I was banned for two years. So this is just one year. I’ve got this.”To preserve his career, Onana assembled a team of seven specialists and moved to Spain, where he took training sessions every day in Salou, a beach town not far from Barcelona, to stay fit for the day his ban ended.But because he has refused to sign a new contract in the interim, Ajax used Onana sparingly, starting him only twice since he became eligible to play again in November. “I think my time is over in Ajax already,” he said. “I’ve done my best for this club. But in the end I’m not the one who decides who plays or not.”He expects to move on this summer, to another club, another league, another country. A switch to the Italian champion Inter Milan as a free agent for next season is all but agreed.For now, though, Onana is back in Cameroon, back where it all started, back on the field, back with a team that counts on him.The Indomitable Lions face Ethiopia on Thursday in the second game of their quest for an African championship. Onana sees no reason that he will not be playing. More

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      Juventus Finds Its Fall Guy in Andrea Pirlo

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      Andrea Pirlo was given a difficult task and failed at it. But if Juventus misses out on next season’s Champions League, it won’t be entirely his fault.The jokes almost wrote themselves. Last summer, Juventus announced that it had installed Andrea Pirlo as coach of its under-23 team. It was a thoroughly sensible idea: the perfect place for a beloved former player to cut his teeth in a new phase of his career, the ideal spot for him to take his first job in management.The same, at the time, could not be said for what came next. Ten days after getting that job, Pirlo was handed another, this time as coach of Juventus’s first team, the one that included not only several of his former teammates, but Cristiano Ronaldo, too. And so the jokes came, cheap and quick and irresistible. Pirlo must have really impressed in those eight days! No wonder he got the job: He’d never lost a game!The official explanation was only a little more convincing. “Today’s choice is based on the belief that Pirlo has what it takes to lead an expert and talented squad to new successes,” a Juventus club statement read. There seemed to be only three feasible, overlapping explanations, and none of them reflected especially well on the team’s hierarchy.One — the most likely — was that it had decided to fire his predecessor, Maurizio Sarri, with little time to find a replacement who was not already in-house. Pirlo just so happened to be in the right place at the right time.The second explanation held that Pirlo was a place-holder, willing to do the job for a year or two, until a more suitable candidate became available.And third was the thought that, after nine Serie A titles in nine years, Juventus had come to the conclusion that it could employ anyone it wanted — the least talented of the Backstreet Boys, a friendly spaniel, or maybe, at a push, Sam Allardyce — and still win the league.Whatever the club’s thinking, its folly was ruthlessly exposed over the subsequent nine months. It is not just that Juventus has ceded its title, or even that it has surrendered its dynasty so meekly. It is that the decline has been far steeper, far quicker and far more consequential than the club could possibly have imagined.On Saturday, Juventus hosts Inter Milan — the team coached by its former manager, Antonio Conte, and overseen by its former technical director, Giuseppe Marotta, and that has swept to the championship this year — knowing that it must win if it is to retain any realistic ambition of playing in the Champions League next season. Otherwise, barring a collapse from one or more of Atalanta, A.C. Milan or Napoli, the ignominy of the Europa League beckons in Turin.Juventus currently lies in fifth place in Italy, just outside the Champions League places for next season.Alessandro Di Marco/EPA, via ShutterstockThe likelihood, of course, is that much of the blame for that will be placed squarely on Pirlo’s shoulders. Already, his future is the subject of intense scrutiny in the Italian news media: There have been various reports in the last few weeks of emergency talks inside the club to establish whether he will be allowed to fulfill the second and final year of his contract.Outside, too, he seems to have been identified as the source of the problem. This week, a handful of Juventus fans confronted — though that is not quite the right word for what was, basically, quite a congenial conversation — the veteran goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon outside a training facility the club was using and asked if it was true that the squad had given up on its rookie manager. Buffon assured the supporters it was not true.Regardless, Pirlo is experienced enough to know this is how it works. The manager is always the fall guy, and particularly in these circumstances. Juventus had won nine consecutive titles with experienced managers at its helm. The year it appointed a neophyte, it collapsed. It is hardly outrageous to believe those two things might be connected.For all the significance they are afforded, for all that we hang on their every word and elevate the best of them to guru status, managers do not make quite as much difference as we think. There have been several academic studies on how much of an impact they have on results. The book “Soccernomics” held that managers account for, at most, 8 percent of a team’s performance. “The Numbers Game” had it slightly higher. Neither estimate puts a manager’s significance close to the importance of money, or luck.That is not to say managers do not matter. Elite soccer, in particular, is a sport of the very finest of margins; often, all that separates great triumph from bitter disappointment is a momentary lapse of concentration here or a little extra fitness there. A single, controllable factor that affects 8 percent of the outcome matters a great deal.Inter Milan, led by the former Juventus manager Antonio Conte, won its first Italian title in a decade this season.Matteo Bazzi/EPA, via ShutterstockPirlo would, on the surface, seem to be proof of that. Juventus had what appeared to be an unassailable advantage over its domestic competition for almost a decade, and yet when it traded an experienced manager for an inexperienced one, it slumped not by a few points, but from first to, potentially, fifth. Eight percent is the difference, it turns out, between Serie A titles and the Europa League.A little deeper, though, the picture is more complex. The reason that soccer tends to react to disappointment by changing the manager is that it offers the illusion of the simple solution: Fix that 8 percent and everything else will follow. In the case of Juventus — in every case, for that matter — it does not quite work like that.The club that Pirlo inherited was not quite the smooth-running machine it appeared. His appointment itself was proof of that: He was hired on short notice because the incumbent, Sarri, had proved stylistically unsuited to the squad. Pirlo, from the start, appeared equally ill matched: The soccer he wanted to play did not seem to be the sort of soccer that fit the players at his disposal.Pirlo didn’t create the problems at Juventus, but he didn’t fix them, either.Alberto Lingria/ReutersThat sort of disjointed, disconnected thinking has infected almost everything Juventus has done for some time, perhaps since it last reached the Champions League final in 2017. The signing of Ronaldo — a hugely expensive indulgence, even if his performances preclude its being called a mistake — is the most glaring example. But there are many more.Juventus has spent the past few years desperately trying to offload whomever it can in order to reduce its salary commitments and to comply with European soccer’s financial regulations, often relying on curious swaps to do so: João Cancelo for Manchester City’s Danilo, Miralem Pjanic for Barcelona’s Arthur. It has left many on the squad feeling unwanted and uninvested.At one point, Juventus lent Gonzalo Higuaín to A.C. Milan and then Chelsea, only to welcome him back when Sarri was appointed. It then spent a summer trying to offload the playmaker Paulo Dybala, arguably its most gifted attacker other than Ronaldo, in order to pay Higuaín’s wages.Dybala stayed and, eventually, Higuaín left. Last season, Juventus was forced to leave Emre Can off its Champions League squad — without offering him any warning — because its playing resources were so bloated. He departed soon after, along with a clutch of other exiled veterans.Even the signing of Ronaldo — a commercial success and, broadly, a sporting one, too — has hardly been an exercise in joined-up thinking. At this stage in his career, Ronaldo is effectively a pared-down attacking spearhead; he cannot, or at least does not, run and press as he might have done a decade ago. And yet Juventus has presented him with two coaches whose approaches work only if attackers do just that: first Sarri, and now Pirlo.Will Cristiano Ronaldo accompany Juventus into the Europa League next season?Marco Bertorello/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt is easy to see why Juventus would want to assume that Pirlo is the source of all of its troubles, to decide that changing the coach, swapping out the rookie for a more garlanded name, has the air of a panacea. It was a gamble, and it backfired. He wasn’t good enough, not yet. It was too much, too soon.That might all be true, but it is not the root of the problem. Pirlo is not a cause; he is a symptom. The issue, for Juventus, is not with the man who got the job, it is with the people who gave it to him, whose expertise runs so deep that they took a coach with eight days’ experience and threw him into one of the most challenging jobs in Europe, and expected it all to work out fine.A coach, after all, makes only 8 percent of the difference. The other 92 percent comes from the structure and the organization and the thinking behind the manager. Perhaps, as Juventus confronts its demise, the blame should be apportioned on similar lines.The Meaning of the CupBrendan Rodgers and Jamie Vardy haven’t given up on the cup’s magic.Pool photo by Richard HeathcoteIt is the memories passed down between the generations that slowly, steadily accrete into something that becomes a tradition, and so it is with the greatest tradition in English soccer: worrying about the diminishing majesty of the F.A. Cup.Those who were there speak in hushed tones of the year that Manchester United was forced to pull out because the authorities wanted the team to play in a tournament in Brazil instead, or of the time that Liverpool sent out a squad of under-7s because the club had a more important game in Qatar the next day.But every club has its own story: a set of reserves sent out to play so as to save the first team for the league; a manager admitting that the cup is a distraction from the much more important business of securing 14th place, rather than 15th, in the Championship.Nowhere is this played out in more somber tones than on British television, where the only thing that interrupts the self-flagellation about the demise of the magic of the cup is the advertising proclaiming that it is, in fact, alive and well. It is a rich irony, because what has destroyed the cup more than anything else is television, both because of the money it has poured into the Premier League and because of its insatiable demand for content.One of the things that made the cup final special was the fact that it had a whole day reserved for it: We called it “cup final day.” There is no better gauge of its reduction in status than the fact that this year the game — Chelsea vs. Leicester on Saturday — will be squeezed in between Southampton’s meeting with Fulham and Brighton’s match with West Ham.Still, there is hope. The other problem faced by the F.A. Cup these days is that it is almost always won by a team that considers it, at best, a consolation prize and, at worst, an afterthought, as Chelsea will if it emerges victorious at Wembley this weekend. It is nice for Chelsea, winning the F.A. Cup, but its eyes are cast on much brighter horizons.Things are different for its opponent, Leicester City. Leicester has never won the cup. It came close, three times, in the 1960s, but lost in each final it reached. For some time — possibly until it won the Premier League in 2016 — those defeats defined the club, at least in the eyes of a generation of fans. This weekend is a long-awaited chance to address that longing.Winning the cup would mean a lot to Leicester — so much, in fact, that it might even have the power to change the meaning of the cup itself, to prove that the rumors of its demise have been exaggerated, that it does not have a fixed value, but rather that it signifies rather more in some contexts than in others and that, in the right hands, it still matters very much indeed.Glory DaysSporting, which ended a long title drought this week in Lisbon.Pedro Nunes/ReutersFrom a Premier League perspective, this pandemic season has not brought quite so much chaos as anticipated. Manchester City, for the third time in four years, stands as English champion. It is the same in Germany, where Robert Lewandowski’s Bayern Munich picked up a ninth consecutive championship last weekend.Elsewhere, though, the picture is different. Inter Milan had waited 11 years to win Serie A. Lille is two games from winning its first French title in a decade. Atlético Madrid needs two more wins to claim the Spanish championship for the first time since 2014.But no club had waited quite so long as Sporting Lisbon (yes, yes, I know: Sporting Clube de Portugal). Until this week, it had been 19 years since the club last won the league, almost two decades of watching its two great rivals, F.C. Porto and Benfica, trade the title between them.Under Rúben Amorim, its promising coach, Sporting has ended that purgatory in style, going through the season undefeated. That it did so in a season of empty stadiums is a shame, of course, but it did not seem to diminish the celebrations in Lisbon on Tuesday.A word, too, for Ajax, champion yet again in the Netherlands. Rather than mount the trophy it received for winning the Eredivisie in its museum, the club chose to melt it down and create tens of thousands of little stars, one to be sent to each season-ticket holder, a reward for their perseverance in this most difficult of years, something to hold close as a memento of the year they had to stay apart.Not All Ideas Are Bad IdeasNever, it seems, underestimate the vengeance of a governing body scorned. In the month or so since the chaotic life and unmourned death of the European Super League, UEFA has been unsparing in its pursuit of the dozen clubs who concocted the plan, its own little Catilines.Nine of the teams were made to sign a humiliating mea culpa, repudiating their rebellion and promising never to do it again. Particular venom has been reserved, though, for Real Madrid, Barcelona and Juventus, the three holdouts. UEFA has commissioned a disciplinary panel to decide their fate, and the domestic leagues of Spain and Italy may follow suit. The latter is already threatening to deny Juventus a license for next season unless it performs repentance.There is no doubt, of course, that much of the anger over the proposed breakaway was justified. There is little reason to sympathize at all with any of the clubs involved. But that does not mean that UEFA is best advised to use its new power — or, rather, its long-term foes’ sudden impotence — as nothing more than a cat o’ nine tails.Bringing the mutineers to heel provides short-term satisfaction, of course. It flexes the muscles, slakes the thirst for vindication. But it also risks failing to engage with some of the ideas that lay beneath the self-interest and opportunism of the breakaway — some of which, like proper financial controls, are worthy of consideration.Fans in Manchester after City clinched the Premier League title on Tuesday. Soccer’s current economic systems work just fine for the fans and their club.Jon Super/Associated PressMost of all, though, UEFA is in danger of calcifying the status quo, offering it a false status as the final form of the game and demonizing all change at just the point when European soccer needs it most. Not change as devised by the elite, perhaps, but change of some sort.Currently, the economics of the game work for, at most, a couple of dozen clubs: those owned or operated by nation states or individuals of fabulous wealth, and the lesser lights of the Premier League. That is not enough. The central problem with the Super League was that it sought to put a pin in history, to freeze the elite forever as it happens to be now. UEFA’s taste for retribution risks doing precisely the same, but for the game as a whole.CorrespondenceA brilliantly curious question from Bill Eash. “The layout of most Premier League fields includes a small extension outside the playing field,” he points out, correctly. “Most of that surface is sloped to the barriers. I wonder: Are injuries incurred by that design? And what’s its real purpose?”Yes, very occasionally, players hurt themselves by being forced to run at full speed down a hill into a barrier, though thankfully not as often as you would think. And no, I have no real idea why some stadiums — Old Trafford has the starkest off-field slope, I think — are designed like that. I guess it’s to do with drainage, but it has always struck me as a strange idea.Pool photo by Ian WaltonLaurence Guttmacher has a similar “question of culture,” as he put it. “Soccer teams play a man down while someone warms up before entering the pitch. Basketball players enter a game after prolonged periods on the bench. Both sports involve similar physical demands, so why the difference in approach?”I haven’t watched enough basketball benches to confirm this thesis, but if it’s right, my instinct is that it must be rooted in some sort of tradition — soccer players do it because they always have, and basketball players don’t because they never have — and that basketball is probably wrong on this one. It would, I think, be a good idea if the players stretched before coming on. That’s just good sense, isn’t it?Luke Doncic, ready for any type of game to break out.Jerome Miron/USA Today Sports, via ReutersAnd the final one of this orthodoxy-challenging trifecta comes from Carl Lennertz, who asks about the relationship between “the transfer fee versus what the player earns.” This is an especially good one, and it is a subject we should think about more.Essentially, they are totally disconnected. There is no consequential link between a players’ salaries and the fees they can command: A player earning $250,000 a year could cost $50 million to sign; a player on $10 million a year might be given away for some nominal sum. Both are left entirely to the market to decide. I wonder, though, if it might not be a bad idea if that changed, and transfer fees were to become more, well, explicable.By contrast, Rob Haxell is here to pick holes in arguments, particularly my (borrowed) suggestion that there might be ways of reducing the elite teams’ ability to hoard talent. “I wonder how Liverpool would feel about Virgil van Dijk being available on a cut-price deal this summer because they didn’t give him enough playing time?” he wrote, fully aware that an injury exemption would not be an especially difficult thing to draw up. More